The Theophanies in the Old Testament was the Pre-incarnate Jesus Christ

He appeared in different ways more than fifty times in the Old Testament. When Israel experienced Christ's direct presence, He walked the earth, He spoke with His people, and He performed wondrous acts. Although Christ's Old Testament body was more or less man-shaped, it was also very different from a human body. His form was a spiritual body like that of the angels. As such, He did not have the weaknesses or needs of a human body, nor was He bound by man's physical limitations. Christ controlled the physical world; He was not bound by its physical laws.

One of the differences between Christ's body and our body was the extent of its glory. Christ's body had such a burning, radiant, awesome glory, that no one could see Him clearly and remain mortal. The Lord Himself told Moses this in Exodus 33: 5, 20. Moses had asked to see God's glory as He was told in verse 20, "²⁰But He said, "You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live." This awesome glory presented a problem. If men could not live after seeing Him then how could Christ interact with Israel through His Old Testament body? The answer was that God placed several kinds of veils between Himself and people. The basic of these veils was the fact that man's sin-blinded eyes could not normally see into the spiritual realm at all. Both Christ and His angels could not be seen unless God opened human eyes to the true reality.

I agree with this suggestion because if no man could see God's face and live, then God would have to manifest Himself in other ways in order to interact with man. The ways that He chose to reveal Himself could have been because He wanted to show Himself as the true God that the Near Eastern gods were claiming to be. He evidently revealed Himself in ways that false gods supposedly revealed themselves.

Furthermore, John 6:46 reads, "⁴⁶Not that anyone has seen the Father, except He who is from God; He has seen the Father." This verse tells us that that the God seen in the Old Testament must have been the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ.

And, Micah 5:2 reads, "²But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, Though you are little among the thousands of Judah, Yet out of you shall come forth to Me. The One to be Ruler in Israel, Whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting." If you accept the New Testament as an authority, Matthew 2:3-6 provides a very interesting commentary on this passage. According to Matthew the Jerusalem Scribes used this passage to tell the wise men where the Messiah would be born. If Micah was talking about where Jesus would be born, then the second half of Micah 5:2 is very interesting. Micah claims that the child born in Bethlehem had been going forth from creation and from eternity. This almost certainly suggests that the person born in Bethlehem was the God seen so often by the Old Testament believers.